Enterprise Architecture
In the quest for competitive advantage, organizations can open their checkbooks for the latest hardware devices and the best IT people. They can lay the most detailed plans and spend months refining them. They can compile gigabytes of data and deploy the most insightful analysis. But if their enterprise architecture is fundamentally unsound, all those resources will not be enough.
Ultimate outcomes are determined by each aspect of an enterprise, as well as the relationship between them.
Enterprise architecture is nothing less than the entire structure of an organization, from business plan to network infrastructure. And as with all structures, real or virtual, a solid foundation is critical. Flaws in this fundamental architecture can undermine all future investment of time and money, blunting the impact of new technologies and generating hidden costs in terms of lost potential. The competitive position of the entire enterprise could be at stake.
Mapping the Master Plan
Asynchrony believes that a comprehensive, holistic analysis of enterprise architecture can detect such faults and illustrate strategies for resolving them. Although technology plays a central role, we're not just talking about computer systems here; ultimate outcomes are determined by each aspect of an enterprise - from goals to structure to hardware - as well as the relationship between them.
We start from a vision of the entire system, with all its complex variables. What are the strategies and ultimate goals of an organization? How is the enterprise organized, and what processes are in place? What applications and data does the enterprise use? And what hardware and other resources are at their disposal?
Then we consider questions of relationship. Is this organization structured in the most effective way to realize its goals? Is the enterprise staff hamstrung by the limits of its computer network? Is time going to waste because of an awkward user interface design? What new processes and technologies should be brought to bear?
In so doing, we define the larger context within which all enterprise decisions must be made - the organization's "master plan." We create a structure that maximizes and rationalizes the capabilities of the organization. We identify weak points in the architecture that hamper efficient operations. And while nobody can predict any possible contingency in the future, Asynchrony builds structures that respond to changes rapidly and with minimal disruption.
OWL - Web Ontology Language
At present, Web Ontology Language (OWL) is at the leading edge of enterprise architecture tools. Until now, most programming languages have been designed to present information to humans, with the necessary analysis and interpretation undertaken by human users. But what about the need for applications to process and interpret documents, to parse the implications and relationships of disparate pieces of data? OWL provides the most robust tools yet for machine-driven reasoning and interpretation of data available on the web.
What can OWL do? Take the example of a book-retailing web site. Right now, its engine can make suggestions about books based on the past purchases of the user, and the purchases of users with similar histories. But you can't ask for recommendations the way you might ask a human bookseller: "I'm looking for a historical novel about the Civil War, something literary but with a strong plot that I can read at the beach." With the proper ontology, OWL can look at the semantics of such a request, analyze book reviews and other information on the web, and retrieve relevant, specific suggestions.
OWL seeks to realize the Semantic Web, a vision of the web in which the terminology in Web documents is tagged with explicit, formal meanings, and organized into meaningful relational structures. (Hence the term "ontology," the science of describing types of entities and their relationships.) This allows sophisticated information retrieval and organization that goes well beyond simple keyword searches.